Television for Children: Problems of National Specificity and Globalisation

Television for children: problems of national specificity and globalisation Book or Report Section Accepted Version Bignell, J. (2011) Television for children: problems of national specificity and globalisation. In: Lesnik-Oberstein, K. (ed.) Children in Culture, Revisited: Further Approaches to Childhood. Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke, pp. 167-185. ISBN 9780230275546 Available at http://centaur.reading.ac.uk/21378/ It is advisable to refer to the publisher’s version if you intend to cite from the work. See Guidance on citing . Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan All outputs in CentAUR are protected by Intellectual Property Rights law, including copyright law. Copyright and IPR is retained by the creators or other copyright holders. Terms and conditions for use of this material are defined in the End User Agreement . www.reading.ac.uk/centaur CentAUR Central Archive at the University of Reading Reading’s research outputs online NOTE: This is a chapter published as Bignell, J., ‘Television for children: problems of national specificity and globalisation’ in K. Lesnik-Oberstein (ed.), Children in Culture, Revisited: Further Approaches to Childhood (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan 2011), pp. 167-185. The whole book is available to buy from Palgrave at http://www.palgrave.com/gb/book/9780230275546. My published work is listed and more PDFs can be downloaded at http://www.reading.ac.uk/ftt/about/staff/j-bignell.aspx. Jonathan Bignell Television for children: problems of national specificity and globalisation In the developed nations of Europe, and in the USA, it has long been assumed that television should address children. Thus, notions of what ‘children’ are have been constructed, and children are routinely discussed as an audience category and as a market for programmes. A fundamental set of conceptions of childhood, originating in the late eighteenth century, links the unstated ideological assumptions of the great majority of programme producers, television programme buyers and executives, and parents, politicians and commentators.1 In this respect, the chapter’s focus on the construction of childhood in television has many links with the other chapters in this book. For adults’ assumptions about childhood also inform literature that constructs children as textual subjects and addressees. Childhood has been seen as a life-stage in which emergent subjectivities are predisposed to immorality or amorality, and irrational behaviour, so that adult supervision of children’s development is required. Conversely, the child is also understood as innocent, authentic and pure. Affected by these competing and contradictory discourses about childhood, adult television professionals who have produced and distributed animated programmes have addressed children in a range of ways. 1 The influence of public service television values has been strong in the UK, and powerfully influenced other West European television institutions making programmes that address and thus construct children. This is because of the early establishment of the BBC as a public service broadcaster in radio from 1922 and in television from 1936, and because of the broad acceptance of social-democratic ideologies in western European societies.2 In early European television culture (until the 1960s), television for younger children was oriented towards a concept of playful education. Programmes aimed to connect with their play world, to stimulate their creativity and encourage them to discover the world in an experimental way.3 The BBC and later the commercial public service broadcasters ITV and Channel 4 aimed to elevate the national audience’s taste, intellectual appetite and knowledge, supplying diverse material for diverse audiences, including an audience sector categorised as children.4 In Britain and in many other nations, the requirement for public service broadcasting for children stimulated both animated and live-action television. A range of public service models existed in Western Europe and constructed similar notions of the child audience, and the more monolithic state-supervised television of Eastern Europe also promoted the development of children’s programming. In the USA, non-commercial television broadcasting has been overshadowed by the commercial networks, whose children’s programmes have been reliant on funding from the makers of consumer products marketed to children, such as breakfast cereals or toys. Across the developed world, nevertheless, there are constructions of childhood and children that have been similar enough to facilitate the exchange of productions that are recognised as ‘children’s programmes’. Discourses about genre and audience have a 2 homogenizing effect, and this is connected to commercial relationships of television exchange. Because of its international reach and public visibility in discourses about social policy, children’s television is a paradigm case for debates about the role of the medium in subject-formation, ideology and the globalisation of the media economy.5 But transnational histories of the complexities of its production and exchange remain patchy, and often caught unproductively in debates about the influence of American television on other nations.6 Throughout the history of British television there has been strong resistance to US programmes because of the fear of Americanization.7 This applies especially to children, who are considered more vulnerable to the influence of the consumerism that is said to be embodied in many US toy-based series. Children are also regarded as susceptible to negative influence by the violent content in US children’s programmes, especially cartoons. Indeed, inasmuch as their susceptibility to anti-social influence is what characterises children in such policy debates, childhood itself could be understood as a construction that is legitimated by such ideas about vulnerability to media effects. Since commercial television is associated with the USA as the dominant commercial broadcasting arrangement in the world, suspicion of commercial television has run alongside suspicion of US programming. This is especially the case for programme genres that construct youth audiences, such as pop music programmes and channels, and imported US children’s programming. Each of these genres had commercial success, and throughout the second half of the twentieth century the critique of Americanization, the defence of nationalism and the valuation of tradition have occurred around the totemic figures of the child and the teenager. In this context, the fact 3 that the British and European animation8 discussed in this chapter was not American could become a virtue in itself. Yet imported American fiction television for children, like Lassie (1954-73) or Champion the Wonderhorse (1955-6), set child characters and animals in narratives characterized by the threat and rescue format discussed below in a case study of Gerry Anderson’s puppet series. The kinds of borrowing and mixing of forms discussed in this chapter’s case studies undermine the possibilities for making distinctions between the programmes on the basis of their national cultural characteristics. There have been consistent exchanges of programmes between European countries, and between Europe and the USA. There are inequalities in production funding, and different roles of domestic and imported programming in national television cultures, and at both international and regional levels it has been argued that ‘world patterns of communication flow, both in density and in direction, mirror the system of domination in the economic and political order’.9 Globalization theses proposed by Herbert Schiller, for example, have argued that the globalization of communication in the second half of the twentieth century was determined by the commercial interests of US corporations, working in parallel with political and military interests.10 This discourse connects cultural imperialism with the dynamics of colonialism, arguing that the colonial empires of Britain or France have been replaced by American-dominated commercial empires. Transnational studies of television cannot ignore the impact of the USA, and the broadcast of animation for children in Britain has been dominated by US series. In the period discussed here, examples included Scooby-Doo, Where Are You? (1969), Josie and the Pussycats (1970), The Harlem Globetrotters (1970), and series based on pop 4 celebrities such as The Jackson Five (1971) or The Osmonds (1972). Each of these series was screened in Britain in children’s programming slots, either on weekday afternoons or Saturday mornings. In the early 1980s, exported US animation shown in the UK included He-Man and the Masters of the Universe (1983), whose success led to the subsequent She-Ra: Princess of Power (1985). These series were each repeated for several years, and related toys and merchandising enhanced their cultural visibility. The link between programme import and commodity culture reinforced the stigmatization of US imports as an aspect of cultural imperialism and a supposed threat to the very concept of childhood.11 Although the globalization of television trading appears to entail homogenization, in fact it also produces differentiation. Some programmes are regarded as inimical to childhood, while others are regarded as good for children. Regional flows and institutional arrangements have been developed in Europe to foster and protect its television culture. These transnational relationships foster and protect a shared notion of

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